Oracle Blog

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Monday Feb 25, 2008

Recently we put together a consolidation benchmark to see how an open-source stack performs against the proprietary stack from Microsoft. Solaris, MySQL, and Sun Web Server running on the open-source UltraSPARC T2 processor were pitted against a Microsoft SW stack running on a 4-socket QC Xeon server. This benchmark highlights the continued trend to incorporate MySQL open-source databases and how it works under virtualization (Solaris Zones).

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the MySQL database in Solaris zones is over 3.2 times faster performance than HP DL580 using Microsoft SQLserver database running with the leading virtualization software.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the Sun Java System Web Server with Solaris Zones is 53% faster than than HP DL580 using Microsoft IIS webserver running with the leading virtualization software.

The database performance and the web performance were normalized
and equally weighted for an overall performance metric.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 (1.4 Ghz UltraSPARC T2 processor) including
hardware and open-source software costs has 3.7 times better
price/performance than the HP DL580 system (four Xeon quad-core
processors) with the Microsoft software stack. The Sun solution
has 56% less price than the HP/Microsoft/virtualization configuration.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 used open-source MySQL 5.0 database software
and Sun Java System Web Server 7 which are both free for download to
obtain these results.

Performance Comparison:

System

Configuration (both 64GB Memory)

CPU

RUs

OS

DB SW

Web-server SW

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 1.4GHz

1 chip8 cores

2 RU

Solaris 10 8/07

MySQL 5.0.51a

Sun Java System Web Server 7

HP DL580 G5 2.93GHz

4 QC Xeon16 cores

4 RU

MS Server 2003 EE

MS SQL-server 2005

MS IIS 6.0

System

Performance & Cost (server, 64GB, disks, SW)

Web ops/s

OLTP txns/m

Watts

HW+SW $

NormPerf

Watt/perf

$/perf

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 1.4GHz

9546

224K

480W

$131k

2.36

203

55

HP DL580 G5 2.93GHz

6250

70K

830W

$204k

1.0

830

204

Sun's Advantage

53%

3.2x

73%

56%

2.4x

4.1x

3.7x

Note: Watts are measured server watts during the run.

Benchmark Description

The Full-Stack Consolidated workload consists of 2 primary components:
1) a Web workload consisting of static HTTP requests, and 2) an OLTP
database workload using a mix of common SQL transactions executed on a
mix of tables in an RDBMS.

The Web workload generates static requests for web pages using a mix
of file sizes that range from 100 bytes to 900K bytes with an average
file size of 16K bytes. The metrics from this workload includes the
number of web operations per second.
In this Web workload, a set of 6 client systems emulating thousands
of users, generated HTTP requests to all 3 webservers in parallel
running on the server.

This performance comparison used an Ad-Hoc OLTP workload, called iGEN
OLTP 1.6, which was developed from a realistic customer workload.
iGen OLTP avoids problems that plague other OTLP benchmarks like TPC-C.
In particular, it is completely random in table row selections and
thus is difficult to use artificial optimizations. iGen OLTP stresses
process and thread creation, process scheduling, and database commit
processing. The database has 10 million customers residing in it, and is
approximately 15 GB in size. at time of creation. The transactions are
comprised of various SQL transactions: read-only selects, joins,
inserts and update operations.
For this OLTP workload, 1 client system was used to emulate hundreds
of users, generating SQL transactions to all 3 database instances in
parallel running on the server.

On the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220, the 3x Webserver instances and
3x MySQL database instances where isolated on 6 Containers. Each
webserver zone shared a single storage array, but separate
Gbit network interfaces. The 3x MySQL database zones shared
a single network interface but used separate storage arrays
for the database files and transaction logs.
On the HP DL580, the 3x Webserver instances and 3x SQLserver
database instances where isolated on 6 virtual machines. Each
webserver VM shared a single storage array, but separate
Gbit network interfaces. The 3x SQLserver database VMs shared
a single network interface but used separate storage arrays
for the database files and transaction logs.

When results listed above were obtained when running both the
Web and OLTP workloads concurrently.
The performance results for each workload were normalized using
the results obtained from the HP DL580 as follows: